Too much to say about this one, really, which usually means that it will end up becoming one of my favorite things ever a couple of years from now.

All the style it has - and if there is something that nobody can deny is that this game has style - serves its themes perfectly.

Like a slow cinema police procedural, the amount of thematical twists this manages to pull off is astonishing, particularly when you consider the "gameplay" and how it lulls you a certain flow, giving you agency as quickly as it takes it away from you. You can row, but there's only a single path that river can take.

Masahi Ooka is a genius from writing something so well structured as Placebo.

Now to dust off the trusty DSi with my R4 card to finally understand what the fuck was going on 13 years ago when I triedplaying Flower, Sun and Rain and turned if off after 1 hour.

I came here for the extremely anime and ludicrous plot. That aspect of Ace Combat 7 was honestly disappointing in some ways, the storytelling has some wonderfully over-the-top moments but is also just kind of a mess. This isn't helped by key story details being littered seemingly everywhere, showing up within the mission briefings, the cut-scenes that are told from multiple different perspectives (one of the most important perspectives disappearing for several missions in the middle of the game?), and during in-mission over-the-radio conversations. It's so easy to be laser-focused in on the gameplay, which is often so intense that it needs your undivided attention, only to miss out on some plot detail that's said over the radio as a result and be left confused as to what exactly is happening. By the time I finished the game there were multiple core pieces of the plot and surrounding worldbuilding that I could just absolutely not even begin to try explaining to someone.

The flipside to this is that the sheer nonsense the game indulges itself in lends itself to some incredible and thrilling set-pieces; there are so many moments that are legitimately breath-taking, and even in its final mission Ace Combat 7 manages to just completely one-up itself yet again. Honestly the gameplay here is just generally excellent with plenty of pulse-pounding moments every play session I had, and a superb variety of missions that very rarely repeat the same beats and that recontextualises those beats when they are repeated. I had no idea I would enjoy an airplane dogfighting game, but AC7 manages to make it so much fun. On top of this the game looks gorgeous, especially the weather effects, and the music is fittingly perfectly over-dramatic. Really, with the exception of a couple missions that missed the mark or were a bit too frustrating, everything about this game was super impressive...apart from that tangled up mess of a story.

Revision (16th November 2021); reading kingbancho's excellent review of AC7 (linked below) has helped cement some concerns I'd had previously about the game regarding its xenophobia and how problematic some of the framing in the game is. I think this can be easy to miss both due to how much of a mess the storytelling is and due to how exciting and absorbing the gameplay often is too, but hearing it all laid out as clearly it is in kingbancho's review just...makes it hard not to think a lot less about this game as a result, and certainly makes it much harder to recommend the game to anyone.

https://www.backloggd.com/u/kingbancho/review/253306

A rare breed of maximally-political video game that is seemingly unashamed to throw around terms like 'traditional conservative' and literally laugh in the face of anarchists, even if it isn't entirely sure of what these words mean or imply. Essentially the Metal Gear Solid 4 of the Ace Combat franchise - throws ideas up into the air and then scrambles desperately to pick them up whenever they create conveniently-epic but emotionally/politically-incoherent "moments", perhaps best embodied in a late-game cutscene where two preteen girls grab a glock and shoot up a hard drive of flight data based on a king-turned-pilot in order to preserve the dignified human memory of a monarch who ran bombing missions during the Strangereal World's equivalent of the Kosovo War. Moreso than other Ace Combats, 7 is adamant in siloing fighter jets away from the universe they exist in, licensing and lionising pilots as apolitical titans of the sky who are simply following vocational orders from higher powers - something the godless unmanned drones could never understand.

Another king has more or less sewn up this game's ideology, so I won't bore you with The Implications (if any) of what this game's story chaotically tries to talk about. Mission 16: Last Hope - wherein a global communications outage renders your IFF useless during a mission to save a defecting general - is a real tragedy, though: a mission that perfectly captures the tone of the franchise's overarching "we're all blind pawns on the world's stage" themes in its gameplay, but is then almost immediately nullified by an announcement an hour later that you've unlocked some United States Air Force emblems to plaster all over your fictional fighter jets. No other real-world nation is represented in the game, and coupled with the game's recent Top Gun: Maverick DLC, it's hard not to think the franchise has set a hard course in the opposite direction of highly-conscious predecessors like Electrosphere and The Belkan War. The great thing about these games, at least, is that they have played exactly the same for over 20 years - you can pick and choose the ones that suit your preferred interpretations of strangereality and be none the worse off for it.

When THATCHER'S TECHBASE accidentally landed me in a bunch of newspapers and magazines last year, one question came up in every interview - "Do you think politics belong in video games?". The smart-arse non-committal wise-guy pseud-response I gave people went something along the lines of: well, games are art and art is personal and the personal is a product of the environment and environment is a product of political decisions and therefore every video game is political on some level, blah blah blah, etc. etc. etc. A nice vague answer the stands safely beyond reproach, a politican's response to a question about politics. Ace Combat 7 kinda throws that question into inverted flight by showing us what happens when affairs of state are injected directly into the Unreal Engine, bypassing environmental and personal factors to create pure political product. Sure, Call of Duty and its alikes have pulled this trick before, but they didn't lay down explicit dogma; it was all just set-dressing to make the murder more satisfyingly "real"istic. Project Aces have actually dared to pull up a pulpit here, and throughout the game's latter half I desperately waited for a series-trademark rug-pull moment where we'd learn it was all just a lesson in the blinding effects of radical-technocratic nationalism or whatever political theory the game was mulling over in that particular moment... but it never came. At least the game ends with Reiko Nagase descending from Heaven to tell you how sick your post-stall maneuvers were. That's something I can really believe in.

Ambitious, missed potential, confused, anti-nationalist. Yeah. Emotionally aware, dramatic, pays attention to its individual characters while tripping over itself for what it actually stands for.

They had a great opportunity with the anti-war stuff, not that it's terrible, but it's like... well, it eventually resolves itself into nationalism being bad, which is true, but to get there it also felt like it had to give up another thing it got close to: something along the lines of "war is manufactured by the ones who don't have to experience it." but that gets dashed aside for couple of twists that I won't detail because I don't want to give this a full spoiler tag.

Lovely cast of characters, albeit somewhat scatter-brained usage of them. The method of feeding you cutscenes that are mostly from a non-military non-player perspective is always something I liked, and the aesthetic of shooting it through a camera for journalism that also exists in some places is nice... There's a lot going on in this, it gets very direct with shit like the military silencing journalists (temporarily, in this case) so they don't report on things that should be known, the citizens of your originating country don't fucking care about the war and think it's pointless... It has ambition, like I said before.

It plays nice. It has horrid team-AI, with a caveat: they are decent at damaging enemy planes, they are godawful at finishing them off. It's very scripted, which okay, fine, it's way more focused on making you engage with the narrative and the spectacle (stuff like the ICBM lighting up the entire sky), I don't think it's a huge issue. It's not very difficult outside of a couple of obtuse occasions. It has lots of hectic radio chatter, for me it helps prop up some of the border-line snoozefest levels, but if you think it isn't convincing enough, yeah, there's nothing helping some of these missions. Lots of infinitely respawning pairs of jets and whatnot to keep you occupied. It's whatever.

It's not bad, but it's very... fantastical. It doesn't have the balls to commit to the grand vision that it felt like it was capable of, it hit some really weird twists and story beats in the later bits, and is generally kind of strange.

Emulated via PCSX2 on Linux.